


Cold Mountain

by MermaidMayonnaise



Series: Author's Favorites [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Back to Earth, Episode: s03e10-e11 The Return, Gen, Homesickness, polished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:26:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23239168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/MermaidMayonnaise
Summary: Home isn’t home when you’re not the same person.
Relationships: Atlantis & John Sheppard, Rodney McKay & John Sheppard
Series: Author's Favorites [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1743976
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	Cold Mountain

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Shift](https://archiveofourown.org/works/884897) by [rageprufrock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock). 



> Many years ago, pru wrote the series "Earthside." I read it a few weeks ago, and it never really left me. She never finished the sequel, and that's probably what threw me into action. 
> 
> I've been fighting writer's block for a while. Today at 7 PM I sat at my computer and said, "I am going to WRITE something, even if it is SHIT." Three hours, many edits, and one podfic later, I still think it is shit, but now it is MY shit, and I am proud of it. I hope you like it too.

During his free evenings on Atlantis, John likes sitting on a secluded part of the pier, taking off his shoes and socks and hanging his legs over the side. The spray gently wafts over his feet, a cold mist. Tonight on Earth, John is standing on the beach and there’s a wind, not overpowering but different, and it blows warmly over him. John breathes in the fresh sea air, the salt and the particular spice of the ocean.

He’s far from the central populated towers of Atlantis, billions of miles away, but he imagines it in his mind’s eye: the columns of light, no longer blazing with distance, hints and winks of yellows and pinks and oranges. Atlantis is warm, inviting; but when John opens his eyes he’s blinded with the intense hues of the California dusk. The sun’s almost finished its path across the wide sky, and the fire’s already below the horizon. The clouds--voluminous, cumulus--light up from below in sweeping purples and blues, like a paintbrush painting huge swaths across the sky. 

Except the clouds are all separated in sharp defined edges, and the light is fading, and the stains of color fade into each other until air meets ocean in the horizon and John can’t tell where they converge. If he tries to draw a line between the two, he’ll find that he can’t--not because it isn’t there, but rather because the transition is so effortless that it’s almost a crime to separate them into distinct entities.

The wind whistles around him and it’s the only sound in his ears, the murmur of pedestrians washed away by the waves. His breathing is quiet and steady, shirt blowing and whipping on his chest, pointing westward toward the setting sun. It’s a small relief, a hint of normalcy, that the planets rotate the same way on both Earth and Atlantis. Because if Atlantis spun in a different direction than Earth, then that’s one more aspect to familiarize himself with, to adjust. The stars are different, which is as jarring as looking into a mirror and seeing someone else’s face. He’s so used to seeing Atlantis’ constellations, which should be comforting as they’ve only been on the planet for a few scant years, but is instead disconcerting.

John sometimes wonders about Atlantis: how she’s faring, if she’s in good hands, if she’s happy. Rodney scoffs at John’s fondness for the city, but after a while he begins referring to it as a  _ her,  _ because it seems wrong not to. Atlantis is physically a complicated piece of technology, and she’s just that: technology. But that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes John lays in his enclosed underground room at night, breathes in the stale air of the SGC and imagines that he’s listening to her sad siren song.

He’ll never admit it, but he thinks of her in a wistful way; not just her hallways and her towers and her glowing radiance that blazes solely for him, but what she  _ represents:  _ home. He doesn’t know when Earth stopped being a place to come back to and instead become another planet, one of those in-between places where John flashes a fake charming smile at the natives, adjusts his tac vest, and counts the minutes before he’s on the other end of the parabola, heading in the direction from where he came.

Back on Atlantis, John used to wander the halls at night. It made the rest of the expedition uneasy in the beginning--back before they knew each other and were acquainted with her constant blue glow--whispering tales of possession and witches and bread crumbs leading home. But John never asked for assistance finding the way back, because he never needed to. Atlantis never whispered in his ear, instead putting an intangible hand on his shoulder, imaginary wisps of hair brushing John’s cheek as she leaned in, and pointed a finger: _that way._

John can imagine her on the pier next to him, the one that points toward the horizon: hair blowing in the wind, dress flowing in waves, white feet bare against the cracked wood. She is beautiful and she is pure and she doesn’t belong. John never imagines flying the city to Earth because her beauty would then be confined by the brown dirt instead of being loosely framed by the ocean, wild and raging and free. 

And it doesn’t make any  _ sense,  _ because when Rodney looks at Atlantis, he sees her sweeping lines and curves, and John observes it too from a mathematician's standpoint, but when John looks at her with his eyes closed, he also sees her history: her triumphs and pains and heartaches, and he doesn’t know how he realizes that she’s aching for him--except that he feels it too, the melancholy clouding him in swaths of lilac mist.

He can’t bear it anymore, this separation, but what can he do about it? He can’t change anything about this situation, can only request leave infrequently, and even when he escapes the expressionless mountains of Colorado and the face of the SGC and drives to California so fast that the tires screech and the wind howls in his ears, there’s only the wild Pacific Ocean to greet him. And even  _ that _ isn’t the same, despite John ditching the rental by the side of the beach and running to the coastline, uncaring of the people wandering along the pier who stare at him. He kicks off his shoes and scrambles to where sand meets sea foam, kicking up sheets of yellow grit around him, burying his bare feet in the wet grains and yearning for something that he can’t have.

Rodney won’t, can’t understand. Even when John calls him on the phone, Rodney laughs at him--gently, considering it’s Rodney--and tells John that it’s just homesickness, that this feeling of being a ship off keel will pass. But John can tell that Rodney’s unhappy too, because even as Rodney chirps through the phone about idiot coworkers and spacious labs, John can hear the absence of something in Rodney’s voice. Something that used to resonate in its tones and timbre but instead falls flat like clumps of wet sand, breaking into pieces and oozing gently to the sides, the water blending them into each other and erasing their words like castles, like kingdoms long forgotten.

Sometimes John hopes that this feeling will pass, but he always remembers the phrase  _ better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all,  _ but what he has with Atlantis isn’t love. He isn’t sure what it is, but the deepness and complexity of his pull back to the city that’s so very far away is remarkable. He misses her, but that isn’t everything. He feels like he’s grown roots through her oceans that have embedded themselves deeply into her sea floor; interwoven himself into the plants and earth, and it’s just like the sand dunes--the plants that are vitally important because they hold everything in place. Maybe John and the rest of Atlantis’ people are her foundation, rooting her; without them, she’ll drift cold and empty through the sea and weather the storms. But what’s the purpose of enduring if there’s no one left? Maybe that’s the dilemma that Atlantis faces while she floats alone in Pegasus.

Whenever John can spare the time, he stands where the waves gently lap over his feet and roll over his ankles. He relishes the cold that numbs his toes and heels and shins, and closes his eyes against the sunset of the evening and breathes in deep. The smell of the ocean is universal--and even though the flavor of Atlantis has a slightly different, slightly sadder tang--for a little while, he can pretend.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Catherine Feeny's [Cold Mountain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlXA6fC_2tM) because I was listening to it in the background and then I said, "Huh. This is kinda what I was going for."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Cold Mountain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23240293) by [Podfic Pseud (MermaidMayonnaise)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/Podfic%20Pseud)




End file.
